Born, like other comic book characters, out of an otherwise trivial but life-changing animal bite, the Rabid Librarian seeks out strange, useless facts, raves about real and perceived injustices, and seeks to meet her greatest challenge of all--her own life.

Friday, October 31, 2014

Oh, wow, they have this whole 80s-style websites thing pegged!

Nostalgia is a basic human emotion. It’s an experience that’s practically universal, whether you’re a baby boomer, or you were conceived during Woodstock.

The YouTube channel SquirrelMonkeyCom takes a love for the 1980s to a whole new level, and re-imagines what many of today’s most popular Internet destinations would have looked like back then. If you grew up around then, you’ll definitely appreciate these hypothetical blasts to the past.

So, put down that iPad, take off your Bluetooth headset, and hit pause on Netflix. It’s time to travel back to when DOS (or Disk Operating System, for you kids out there) was the king of operating systems, and the closest thing to a tablet was this.

As an early Gen-Xer, my first computer was an Atari, the ones in high school were TRS-80s and early IBMs, or maybe an Apple II somewhere along there. I spent many a night using a 300 baud modem, all the way through part of grad school, actually, till I got my first real PC and had a higher baud dial-up through Earthlink. Then I graduated from library school and the Internet exploded, and I learned all I could about it and how to use it. Even in my early years at my job, we were still on dial-up, with the old Grateful Med CD-ROMs. Now, thankfully, we have PubMed and DOCLINE. Wow. Just wow. Kids have no idea these days. Thanks to George Takei for sharing this on his Facebook page.